Grim Fandango - Remastered!

Kid Presentable

Something's rotten in the land of the dead, and you're being played for a sucker. Meet Manny Calavera, travel agent at the Department of Death. He sells luxury packages to souls on their four-year journey to eternal rest. But there's trouble in paradise. Help Manny untangle himself from a conspiracy that threatens his very salvation.

One of the most acclaimed adventure games of all time is now back, better than ever. Grim Fandango's epic story of four years in the life (or death) of Manny Calavera, travel agent to the dead, has been remastered to look, sound, and control even better than when it won GameSpot's Game of the Year award upon its original launch. Grim Fandango still stands as a classic of the genre, with unforgettable characters and unique combination of film noir and Mexican folklore.

One of the all-time great adventure games has finally found itself a ticket for the Number Nine Train out of the underworld known as LucasArts, and is getting a remastered re-release for PC, PS4, and Vita on Tuesday, January 27th!

After years of being out of print, unavailable in any digital form, and difficult to get in working order on a modern PC, Sony unveiled a partnership with Double Fine at last year's E3 to bring Grim Fandango back to the land of the living for a modern audience. This remastered version is a faithful recreation of the original, with repainted hi-res textures, some swanky new lighting effects, a re-recorded score with a full live orchestra, new control options (for those not hardcore enough for tank controls) and developer commentary.

Oh my gosh look at all those resolutions. So hi. So crisp.

Anyone with even a passing interest in adventure games owes it to themselves to play this game. In my opinion, it's the pinnacle of the genre.

It's on Steam!
It's on GOG!
It's on the Playstation store!

Let's talk about how great this game is, and how well it holds up probably! Let's talk about how fantastic the soundtrack is, and how the new orchestral recording is the best thing ever probably! Let's use this thread as an excuse to post lots of great Grim Fandango fanart, and then let's all maybe get Manny Calavera tattoos and post pictures of those in here as well. Since a lot of people are probably going to be experiencing the story for the first time, let's keep plot discussion hidden in spoiler tags. Do not be ashamed to come here in search of hints, there is a bit of 90s style puzzling going on in this game!

Here's a neat mini-documentary about the making of Grim Fandango Remastered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNhE7zxJymE

Uselesswarrior

So close now....

Drez

I think I'm going to go with PS4 this time only because it's cross-buy with Vita.

fueledbygin

I'm so excited about this. Huge puzzler as to why it's taken so long for this to see a re-release. I'd guess if you were to take 100 lists of classic games that's near impossible to find and play that people want to play...this would be on the top or near the top on most of those lists for the past umpteen years.

Zxerol

It took that long for someone to say, "Yo, this old and niche adventure game is pretty rad. Here's some fat stacks to make it radder, Tim."

I mean, it took until only very recently for the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games to get re-released -- not even remade in any way -- and it's Star-fucking-Wars. Getting Grim Fandango remastered is a small miracle.

I needed anime to post.

Drez wrote: »

I think I'm going to go with PS4 this time only because it's cross-buy with Vita.

i bought it on PS4 primarily because the fact that Sony announced it suggests they had some hand in making it happen, and i want to reward them for that

Kid Presentable

Grim Fandango's rebirth can be attributed to the same thing as the reemergence of X-Wing and TIE Fighter: George Lucas sold all his stuff. Disney's acquisition of Star Wars included acquiring the LucasArts game studio, and it was that new ownership that finally opened all this great stuff up for licensing deals. Apparently there are some dedicated folks over at Sony who reached out to this newly cooperative LucasArts specifically to work out a deal to get Grim Fandango, and then went and partnered up with Tim Schafer's Double Fine to make it happen.

Kid Presentable

From Wikipedia

The remastered version was predicated on the transition of LucasArts from a developer and publisher into a licensor and publisher in 2013 shortly after its acquisition by Disney. Under new management, LucasArts licensed several of its intellectual properties, including Grim Fandango, to outside developers. Schafer was able to acquire the rights to the game with financial assistance from Sony, and started the process of building out the remaster within Double Fine Productions. Schafer said that the sale of LucasArts to Disney had reminded them of the past efforts of former LucasArts president Darrell Rodrigeuz to release the older LucasArts titles as Legacy Properties, such as the 2009 rerelease of The Secret of Monkey Island, and they began to seek ways to acquire these properties. Though Double Fine approached other companies, they found significant help from Adam Boyes, Sony's vice president of publisher and developer relations, who also wanted to see Grim Fandango rereleased. Boyes and Schafer agreed that the re-release would need to be remastered, and the two companies worked together to secure the IP and remastered development funding.

Bartholamue

Best 3 bucks I ever spent.

Lucascraft

I have never played this.

That gets remedied tomorrow.

Erlkönig

Just a quick little FYI:

GOG download is up.

Hardtarget

up on steam now as well and support steam cloud!

wooo so excited

joshofalltrades

Buying this today

It's been so long since I played I have forgotten all the puzzles!

Handkor

joshofalltrades wrote: »

Buying this today

It's been so long since I played I have forgotten all the puzzles!

Don't worry it will come back to you like riding a bicycle.

RisenPhoenix

Time to break out some Lumbago Lemonade and immerse myself in my childhood again.

Senna1

Oh man; I LOVED LOVED LOVED Full Throttle; I don't even know how many times I played through that game from 1995 to 2000.

I hope this is a huge success, and it gets followed on with more of the old LucasArts titles. I know they've done the early Monkey Island games too, and I'm pretty sure I saw something about Sam & Max remasters/redux as well...

Blackjack

I can still remember the in-game title drop.

With bony hands I hold my partner
On soulless feet we cross the floor
The music stops as if to answer
An empty knocking at the door
It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When last I held him to my breast
But now we dance this grim fandango
And will for years before we rest.

Asharad

Just bought this on the PS4. It won't let me download it, as of yet, though.

Can't wait. As others have said, it's been so long I've forgotten most of the puzzles.

CowShark

You might try going to the PS4 game downloads page in the web-based store, and telling your PS4 to download it from there.

Leastways, my PS4 didn't have the option to download the game anywhere on the console, upon or after buying the game, and that's how I got it to work.

Zenitram

The reveal for this game was one of the best ever, can't wait to play it again. And I was 12 the first time around so many of the puzzles (and probably humor) went right over my head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nw8vFvJcUA

Cobell

The question now isn't if I will buy Grim Fandango again, but how many copies and across how many platforms.

Wraith260

Senna1 wrote: »

Oh man; I LOVED LOVED LOVED Full Throttle; I don't even know how many times I played through that game from 1995 to 2000.

I hope this is a huge success, and it gets followed on with more of the old LucasArts titles. I know they've done the early Monkey Island games too, and I'm pretty sure I saw something about Sam & Max remasters/redux as well...

Double Fine have announced a remastered version of Day of the Tentacle so that's next on the cards as far as up dates, but GOG.com have been getting plenty of old LucasArts stuff added lately so i'm sure we'll see more of the old point & click games, both in their original form and new prettier versions.

Dark Raven X

This game has an amazing trophy list FYI

Uselesswarrior

Why is this available on Steam and GOG but not on the PS4 for another 24 hours?

Tiger-

Blackjack wrote: »

I can still remember the in-game title drop.

With bony hands I hold my partner
On soulless feet we cross the floor
The music stops as if to answer
An empty knocking at the door
It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When last I held him to my breast
But now we dance this grim fandango
And will for years before we rest.

This is a Calavera(link in spanish), just a short rhyme that is popular on the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Usually written with grim humor in mind, loved writing them for school.

Never got the chance to play Grim Fandango just saw someone do a LP of it a few years ago, so i'm looking forward to this.

Oh My God

Tiger- wrote: »

Blackjack wrote: »

I can still remember the in-game title drop.

With bony hands I hold my partner
On soulless feet we cross the floor
The music stops as if to answer
An empty knocking at the door
It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When last I held him to my breast
But now we dance this grim fandango
And will for years before we rest.

This is a Calavera(link in spanish), just a short rhyme that is popular on the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Usually written with grim humor in mind, loved writing them for school.

Never got the chance to play Grim Fandango just saw someone do a LP of it a few years ago, so i'm looking forward to this.

Years and years later, I find out that Manny's name is meaningful.

Cool. Now I need to re-purchase it again (my original copy went wandering when lent to a friend) just to show support for the genre and see whether every time Manny introduces himself I go," That name. Wow."

CaptainNemo

Yep. Still won't load on PS4. Talked to tech support, apparently it might be up around 3 pacific time.

Hardtarget

man, my favourite thing so far is that I bought it on steam so that I could use steam cloud to play at home and also while on the road traveling in a few days and share the same game and for some ungodly reason it only supports opengl 3.3 and higher, which means HD4000 or higher for integrated graphics. Sadly my laptop had a HD3000 which only supports up to opengl 3.1 so I'm shit out of luck and it doesn't run.

This is a game based on a polished up graphics engine from 1998 and it can't run on hardware that came out in 2011

Uselesswarrior

CaptainNemo wrote: »

Yep. Still won't load on PS4. Talked to tech support, apparently it might be up around 3 pacific time.

Someone at Sony fucked this up. This is going to hurt their day ones sales by a lot.

seasleepy

Tiger- wrote: »

Blackjack wrote: »

I can still remember the in-game title drop.

With bony hands I hold my partner
On soulless feet we cross the floor
The music stops as if to answer
An empty knocking at the door
It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When last I held him to my breast
But now we dance this grim fandango
And will for years before we rest.

This is a Calavera(link in spanish), just a short rhyme that is popular on the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Usually written with grim humor in mind, loved writing them for school.

And I thought I was all smart for vaguely "remembering" that calavera means skeleton*! I'd never heard of the poetry meaning, that's really neat.

(*It doesn't, though I was close-ish. It means skull.)

CaptainNemo

http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2015/01/27/grim-fandango-remastered-ps4-download-problem-given-workaround-sony/

Okay, this method works. I'm downloading now. I do this not out of any love for Sony, but because I want to pour money over Double Fine.

Bubby

Kind of dissapointed they didn't do anything to the backgrounds or properly adapt it for widescreen.

Death of Rats

If anyone wants to send me a steam key for this I'd love you forever.

Stupid being broke and having responsibilities and all that.

SniperGuy

Having never played this, I am incredibly intrigued. Loved old adventure games, just missed this one. I have access to a vita, PS4, and a fancy PC. What's the best place for this? Vita seems tempting for on the go.

Orogogus

Bubby wrote: »

Kind of dissapointed they didn't do anything to the backgrounds or properly adapt it for widescreen.

What do you expect to see on the edges of a widescreened version? It's an adventure game with static rooms designed for 4:3; a lot of the shots probably don't have anything on the sides to show.

In the Homeworld thread you mentioned that DoF is cinematic, but isn't framing a pretty important part of that, too? Like, in the shot below it's not just backgrounds, but the whole room is sized for the original screen ratio:

http://static.gog.com/upload/images/2015/01/37e0439b10ea72009941522c828024a50b933e62.jpg

Librarian's ghost

Got this on PS4. Already had yhe game glitch and manny got into an animation loop and all controls froze. I had this exact glitch way back originally.

Accurate.

CaptainNemo

Well.

The land of the living is totally fucked.

Hardtarget

Bubby wrote: »

Kind of dissapointed they didn't do anything to the backgrounds or properly adapt it for widescreen.

if I recall they said that the one piece of archive material they coudn't find were the original background and it would have been way out of scope/budget/whatever to recreate them from scratch

Uselesswarrior

CaptainNemo wrote: »

http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2015/01/27/grim-fandango-remastered-ps4-download-problem-given-workaround-sony/

Okay, this method works. I'm downloading now. I do this not out of any love for Sony, but because I want to pour money over Double Fine.

What is this a work around for, does everyone have to do this?

CaptainNemo

Basically, the game won't download on the PS4 despite being bought. I think PC copies are fine.

Uselesswarrior

CaptainNemo wrote: »

Basically, the game won't download on the PS4 despite being bought. I think PC copies are fine.

I misread and thought the unlock time for it on the PS4 was an error. Deleted my preloaded copy and started the download again. Doh.

If only PSN downloads weren't embarissingly slow.